It was

often assumed that because of the colour of my skin 

that I would be inarticulate or unintelligent, 

as if a person’s worth was measured by the content of their

melanin.  

I was ashamed my parents were from Pakistan when I was

young, 

then I grew up and realized that it was society, and not me,

that was wrong. 

Ostracized by my peers because of their inherited

ignorance; 

often confused, I tried to ignore my own dissonance.  

Although I was born in Alberta and this was the only

life that I had known,

I started to believe that my race was a sin for which I

could never atone.  

Disenchanted by the discrimination, I began to lie about my ethnicity, 

unable to reject my ego’s stubborn insistence that race, colour

or creed were direct reflections of my identity.   

As I matured, I gained the confidence I desperately needed; it

was my finest hour. 

Until my celebrating was shattered by news of two airplanes

colliding with the twin towers 

by nameless, and Godless cowards.  

I began to feel diseased, like my skin was covered in

cancerous fleas. 

The world suddenly seemed to turn on anyone that even

remotely looked brown;

bigotry was blind to whether someone was from the Middle East or

Cape Town.  

Targeted and then debased, 

history repeated itself like slavery, civil rights

movements and genocides that our ancestors were forced to face. 

Disgusted by the human race, our creator sighed 

by the way we had evolved and diverged from our pure states. 

Though I always identified as a Muslim, I began to feel

displaced 

as I had been raised to love everyone regardless of their

beliefs, values or race.  

Never told to condemn another human being as I was taught as a

child that we were fundamentally the same. The omnipresence of

threats of jokes about curry at my expense was actually a

blessing 

as they showed me that I possessed wit and resilience, something

my tormentors were severely lacking.  

To this day, blanket generalizations are the one thing I cannot

tolerate; to demonize an entire group because of one person’s hate

filled mental state is only successful at revealing that one is illiterate.

It has become more common to invalidate our bonds 

than to appreciate the longer list of ways in which we

relate.  

The similarities from one human to the next are

endless and astounding, 

from the placement of each atom that we are to

our anatomy; 

yet, we are tricked into being afraid of our own brothers,

explain to me again why and how this is a democracy. 

Aware that social categorization is the cause for

viewing things in terms of us and them,

as though some of us are made of dirt whilst others are somehow

gems.

We have delineated from love because of centuries

enraged by different ways

of praying that it is not too late for the world to change.